Robert Duffy (id) .plan Update

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By Apache

id programmer Robert Duffy updated his .plan about "I thought I would clarify a few of the reasons and also take the time to mention some of the hardware and software we found incredibly useful during the development of DOOM 3." The update is rather long, but here's a nice chunk of it:

To put things in perspective, most production levels in DOOM 3 contain more media assets than all of Quake 3: Arena. When we started working on the memory foot print, our goal was a 256MB system. In most cases loading up an area of the game on a 256MB system works fine, the problems arise when you start to transition from one area to the next ( successive map loads ). Memory fragmentation starts to really work against us and it ultimately made it just not feasible for a reasonable play experience to support 256MB.

Two basic options make up the quality levels, sound diversity and image fidelity.

Sound diversity is effectively how many sounds we support per sound shader for a given "sound". There may be for instance, 7 different "bullet striking the wall" sounds for a given bullet. In low quality, we only use one sound for this vs randomly choosing between one of the seven available. When we started on memory optimization, most levels used between 80 and 100 megabytes of sound data. We made the choice to move to .OGG for quite a few sounds which effectively removed the problem for us.